


Guiding Lines

by lllsssr



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-15
Updated: 2017-02-15
Packaged: 2018-09-24 14:52:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9766718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lllsssr/pseuds/lllsssr
Summary: Sometimes Steve lost faith in Bucky. Watching him scribble a peach crayon into Snow White’s face was one of those times.***Steve attempts to teach Bucky to sketch, and ends up learning something himself.





	

            Sometimes Steve lost faith in Bucky. Watching him scribble a peach crayon into Snow White’s face was one of those times.

            He cleared his throat to announce himself at the mouth of the hallway, but Bucky didn’t look up from his seat at the kitchen table, from his dedicated coloring work. He was off in his own little world.

            “That a present for Barton’s kids?” Steve asked, walking in.

            Barton was finally caving in and bringing his family out of the country cabin occasionally.

            “Nah,” Bucky answered, blunt. “S’for me.”

            “Oh. Huh,” Steve said, and continued to the kitchen for the thing he meant to get, but he forgot what that was and found himself staring blankly into the fridge.

            Getting brainwashed by HYDRA was no papercut, and even the recovery treatments in Wakanda took their toll. Steve understood Bucky’s mood swings, anxiety, PTSD. He was a solider, after all. But regressing into childlike hobbies never sat comfortably with Steve.

            Back in the old days, when thugs beat Steve to a pulp, when the rain and cold on the battlefield bit down to the bone, when he sank the plane into the sea—even in the present, when he woke up and found that time itself had been yanked out from under his feet like a rug—he always kept a strong core, a glowing metal idea of himself that didn’t falter.

            Bucky was a lot like him, and he knew, somewhere deep in his shaggy head, was the same kind of indestructible core, and that filling in a dwarf’s potato-shaped nose with Crayola stubs was not part of it.

            Then, Steve got an idea, shut the fridge, disappeared to his bedroom, and returned, dropping charcoal pencils and sheets of heavy paper onto the kitchen table.

            Finally, Bucky looked up.

            “I got an idea,” Steve said. “How about I teach you to sketch?”

            He took the seat across from Bucky, chair legs squealing.

            Sketching was a fantastic idea. He had lobbed the idea of keeping a journal at Bucky a few times with no success, but a sketch diary could work just the same, letting him pour out his thoughts and refurbish his obliterated imagination.

            Bucky regarded the new pencils like bamboo splints.

            To convince him, Steve grabbed one and a sheet of paper and glanced around the room before his focus settled on the window. He started to outline a quick sketch, vertical perspective lines of apartment buildings and traffic poles shooting onto the page. Once he crosshatched the shadows, it shaped up to be a pretty handsome drawing of the view outside.

            Bucky curled his nose at it.

            “Thanks, I’m gonna stick with my dwarves,” he said, then ducked his head back down.

            Steve’s optimistic smile deflated. “Come on,” he said, nudging some blank paper toward Bucky. “You can draw dwarves if you want. Make them shorter, fatter, dwarf-ier. It’s all up to you when you draw them.”

            He didn’t expect that to sway Bucky, not so quickly, but Bucky lifted his head and fixed him in a glare that was challenging.

            “Oh, really?” he said.

            “Really,” Steve said. “Promise.”

            Bucky pushed the paper back at Steve. “Draw a dwarf, then. A _dwarf-ier_ one.”

            “No, that’s your job,” Steve said, starting to push the paper back.

            Bucky did not give, and the paper wrinkled between their converging fingers. “I want to see you do it first,” he said.

            Steve gave in. He let the paper slide toward him, took a new sheet, and straightened out the fresh creases. “Fine.”

            He drew a thumb-shaped body, then little soup-can arms that stuck out at weird angles. They didn’t look right. He glanced up at the coloring book for a reference.

            Bucky noticed and snapped it shut, flipped it onto its front so the cover was hidden.

            “No cheating,” he said.

            “I’m not!” Steve laughed.

            He added knobby little feet, struggled with the head, and topped him off with a pointed hat. Clearly the little guy was much more two-dimensional, had much less personality, than Sleepy or Grumpy or whoever. But it wasn’t like Steve drew dwarves that often, or at all.

            Bucky leaned over to see the sketch. “Looks like a snowman with a witch’s hat,” he said.

            “Thanks, Buck.” Steve crumpled up the drawing and pitched it into the garbage can on the other side of the room—perfect shot.

            “Really, really bad,” Bucky continued.

            “Enough,” Steve said. “I don’t know how to draw dwarves, I’ll admit that. I’m used to drawing other things.”

            “So draw one of those,” Bucky said.

            “Like what?”

            Bucky shrugged. “A plane. You know what a plane looks like?”

            Steve rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I only almost died in one, punk.”

            He grabbed a new sheet of paper and started to sketch. He knew what planes looked like, had sketched them often enough, himself lying in the grass, while they were parked in the airfields with their bodies painted with pinup girls and their wings pimpled with bullet holes.

            He sketched one from a three-quarters angle, in flight, but it was hard to nail down the wingspan. It kept jutting out from the body like fat, crooked leaves, and he couldn’t get it right. It seemed impossible to draw without the real thing in front of him.

            He glanced up, subtly, then flattened his forearm over the first sketch and tried at another. This one he drew top-down, how most people would sketch an airplane. Simple. There were wings, a tail, and a cockpit. No shadows.

            “There,” he said, showing it.

            Bucky said nothing, but grabbed the cityscape Steve had drawn a moment ago, seemingly to show the sheer drop in detail.

            “It’s been a while,” Steve said, rubbing the back of his neck. “We don’t use planes like this anymore. Always flying in jets and helicarriers.”

            “You’re blaming time?” Bucky said.

            “You’re right, it was only about _seven decades_ ago,” he pointed out.

            “Fine,” Bucky said. “Draw something current. Draw Stark’s tower.”

            “The point here was for you to draw something.”

            Bucky shook his head. “Not the point,” he said, vaguely.

            Steve sighed and acquiesced. It was the only thing to do with Bucky at times.

            He sketched Stark’s tower, which would have been simple enough if it was a normal skyscraper, but the swooping angles were hurdles to jump. He gave it a waistband with a big A-shaped belt buckle. Was there an antenna on top? What shape were the windows on a slim, curved building? He had been there a hundred times but couldn’t remember the exact proportions or details, and certainly couldn’t conjure them out of the air if he wanted it to look like the original.

            “You’re really testing me here, aren’t you?” Steve said.

            “Try to remember,” Bucky said.

            Steve didn’t want to. The building he drew already looked like an ugly basketball hoop, and he didn’t bother starting again.

            Bucky pushed out of his seat, and Steve thought he was so disappointed that he was leaving—which was something, all right. Steve didn’t expect to be the one disappointing Bucky here.

            But Bucky stopped behind Steve’s chair and just stood there—his presence made the hair on the back of Steve’s neck rise.

            “Draw me,” he ordered.

            Steve blew out a breath. This was something he couldn’t stumble over. The image of Bucky was imprinted in his mind like a primordial crater, like a tombstone engraving. He knew him better than himself, could feel the vibe so clearly.

            He grabbed a clean sheet of paper and laid down the figure lines—a circle with a midline through it, which he furnished with contours and shapes and hair and eyes.

            In the old days, he sketched Bucky in the apartment they shared, while the sun rose and inched its light across the floor. He stole those early moments to capture the lines of Bucky’s sleeping body, knotted in blankets, slack-jawed, bone-tired from army training.

            But Bucky had been in front of him, then. Now he wasn’t.

            Steve finished and surveyed the work.

            It had all Bucky’s attributes. Long hair, wide nostrils, and sad, half-lidded eyes. But the assembly was so slightly off that no one would look at it and recognize the inspiration without some help. Maybe if Steve told them who it was, they might tilt their head and say, “Hm. I can see that.”

            Bucky started to lean over Steve’s shoulder to see.

            Embarrassed, Steve pressed the charcoal into the paper to add shadows, obscure the sketch’s shortcomings in darkness.

            The pencil tip snapped.

            No. He couldn’t let Bucky see the stranger on the page, the apparent proof that he didn’t even know what Bucky looked like. He crumpled the paper into a ball and flung it at the garbage can—perfect shot, again.

            “All right,” he admitted. “I can’t do it. Can’t draw. I’m a fraud.”

            With a reference, he was fine. It was a lot like reading sheet music versus writing a song, or following a recipe versus making one.

            Bucky rested his hands on Steve’s shoulders. It was one of the few times he ever reached out, made contact. It made Steve shiver. But just as quickly, Bucky clapped the shoulders gently, walked around the table, and returned to his seat.

            “That’s the point, right there,” Bucky said. “Sometimes you need guiding lines. Can’t work with nothing to pull from.”

            Steve wondered if Bucky was talking about him. So often, he expected Bucky to act like his old self, even though he had so little to pull from, with all his memories scraped out like melted ice cream from the bottom of a carton.

            And at the same time, he wondered how he never knew the limit of his own drawing abilities. He sketched, always had, ever since the old days. But that perception was broken as easily as the pencil tip.

            Bucky flopped open the coloring book, grabbed a sky-blue crayon, and dragged it inside the outline of Snow White’s dress.

            Steve dragged his chair to Bucky’s side of the table, grabbed a nub of warm red, and pushed it into a dwarf’s nose.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading. Please leave a comment if you liked it.


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